Barbara Kantrowitz

When Steve Jobs introduced Apple's new tablet computer earlier this year, there were plenty of snickers about the menstrual undertones of the name "iPad." Now it turns out that the device—and its mobile cousins—are actually useful for, uh, tracking periods.

This spring, an Australian named Norrie May-Welby made headlines around the world as the world's first legally genderless person when the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages sent the Sydney resident a certificate containing neither M for male or F for female.

Remember the episode of ‘Sex and the City’ in which the girls were shocked that Carrie’s beau Berger broke up with her via a post-it note? At the time, it appeared to be an abnormally cruel and cowardly way to leave a lover. But seven years later, it just seems so . . . 2003. Almost quaint, in fact.

They're CEOs, politicians, and reality-TV-show stars, but lately they've all been behaving like mean girls. “In our culture,” says Rosalind Wiseman, author of "Queen Bees and Wannabes," “we get rewarded for mean-girl behavior, so we see adults behaving in ways that we typically assign to teens." Who's fault is that: theirs or ours?

By the time you reach the point of applying to college, you may feel that you've heard way too much advice from your parents, your teachers, your guidance counselors, your neighbors—even that guy who graduated from your high school three years ago whom you ran into at the movies last week. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about where you should apply, what you should study, and even what you should write in your essay. If you can stand it, here's one more piece of advice: forget everything you've heard, at least for a moment, and think about the most important person in this process: you. What do you want out of college?It's a simple question with a very complicated answer. In fact, it's the theme of this 14th annual edition of the NEWSWEEK-Kaplan College Guide. Instead of focusing on different types of schools, we began by imagining different types of students and finding an environment that would work best for each one. Veteran education reporter Jay Mathews has assembled a...